The Diversity of Disobedience in Military Organizations

Abstract

Disobedience among military personnel is common and can be highly consequential, given the military's centrality to the conduct of foreign policy and war. Despite this, scholars of international affairs typically assume that subordinates in the military obey their orders. While scholarship on military politics acknowledges the prevalence of disobedience, it focuses on group-level forms of resistance and characterizes all such behavior as undesirable. Both of these analytical choices obscure the fact that individuals in the military can respond to orders they do not like in any number of ways. Building on existing work on civil-military relations and military decision-making, this article develops a novel conceptual typology of individual-level disobedience in military organizations. Drawing on dozens of diverse examples, it shows how such resistance is best categorized into four broad types: defiance, refinement, grudging obedience, and exit. Further, it demonstrates the advantages of adopting this typology. In particular, it highlights how military disobedience can be either disloyal or loyal; disobedience can be productive by fostering innovation, adaptability, or cohesion in military organizations. In addition to providing new variables for research on military politics, this typology also points to underexplored linkages between behaviors that have so far been studied separately, such as desertion, surrender, and mutiny.